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A Wireless Network for a 4-Story Apt. Building?
zzzreyes asks: "I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers. I have just received, through the death of a great aunt, about $7,000. I want to know how and what I should buy, to provide wireless access through out the whole building, so we can all share one connection. There are 6 double-room apartments on each side, and we only have four floors. I'll hopefully have access to the elevator shaft, in case I need it. Will $7,000 be enough?" How cheaply could you do something like this, assuming you had access to much of the building? What would be the best way to set up the access points to guarantee the best coverage for the whole building?
To start, I'd buy a single 802.11g WAP and a single wifi card (preferably for a notebook). Plant the WAP somewhere central and walk around with the notebook and see what kind of link quality you get.
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You might also want to try connecting a server to the WAP via one of the ethernet ports (assuming the WAP has some) and do some file transmission and pinging as you walk around, to make sure your connection is clean. Or maybe do some test gaming against a machine connected to the WAP.
If you can reach it from everywhere, good!
Otherwise try different locations and try to minimize the number of positions required to cover every location likely to have a PC. Then you just need to get an 802.11g card for every PC.
It must be a slow news day, when something like this gets posted to
And a slower work day when I respond.
It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left. So yes, you'll want to set up repeaters, etc.
$7000 should be more than plenty for this. In fact, you could probably do this for under $1000 without too much trouble, then take the remaining $6000 and do something useful with it. For example, take a trip overseas and spend a few weeks somewhere you've never been. London is a great place to start. Foreign, but not too foreign.
For under a thousand you can get round trip airfare for two to London, leaving you with $5000 to blow while you are there. So, let's say two weeks in a decent hotel (say $200/night). That's $2800, leaving you with $2200 for meals, etc. Or hell, just do a one week venture and live really high on the hog.
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Um, ok, this is peculiar.
1) Why would you spend that much money on setting up wireless in your appartment building for everyone? Unless you've already got a surplus of income, you own the appartment building, or you're into some sort of odd techno-charity urge addiction, I'd suggest you don't waste your money on something so frivilous: buy a house or pay off your debt, FFS! Hell, invest the money, if you don't have debt and don't want to buy a house.
2) If in fact you are crazy or do own the appartment building, by all means, set things up to share internet access - at a (minor) to your tenants (either enough to cover costs, or to make a profit, you decide how nice you want to be). Personally, if it were me, I'd wire the place for ethernet (myself), provided the building wasn't too old (1970's). If the building was old and crappy, I probably wouldn't bother, and try and sell it off - though it would certainly still be feasable.
You can choke wireless networks up pretty quickly, and they introduce needless security issues. For the cost of an 8-port (or 16, or whatever, depending on how many ports per appartment you put in) 100BT (or go GigE, the cost difference is negligible now) and a couple hundred hards of cat5, you can get hundreds the bandwidth/signal quality and many times the security of wifi. The cost would be similar, and could possibly be under $500, provided you didn't splurge and get a nice managed router to bridge stuff to the outside world.
To be honest, though: I don't see why you even bothered asking this question. Are you not a geek? For me, the most fun of any project is the planning and getting things set up. You've got the resources of hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable people, after all: the Internet via search engine (WTF are you doing with an "Ask Slashdot", anyway? DAMN). The payoff of your work (ie, the planning and research) is the implimentation - to see how well you planned your project. What's the payoff if you have someone else do the research/thinking for you?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left.
In the US, at least, it's generally recognized their are two types of apartment building: "pre-war" and "post-war" (from the submitter's spelling of "storey" I'm guessing he's a Brit or other Anglophone).
The war referred to is the Second World War; the difference in the buildings is in the materials (and to a lesser extent, the quality) of construction. Basically, post-war building don't have "real" walls: they have plasterboard or Sheetrock (it's a capitalized because it's a trademark, like Kleenex, I think), thin pieces of crap that stop nothing but physical access and light. Radio, and more annoyingly, sound, goes right through.
That's why if you're shopping for an apartment, and you even intend to immerse yourself in your opera music, rock out to your heavy metal, or kill kittens to your porno collection, you want pre-war construction. Even if you don't have any loud habits, odds are your neighbors will, so you still want pre-war construction.
The down-side of pre-war construction is that real walls absorb radio waves too. With my admittedly underprepared USB WiFi transmitter, I can see a noticeable weakening of the signal even one room and 10 feet away. I can get a very poor signal (3%-10) up to about 40 feet away, at the elevator, and nothing once I'm in the elevator.
But I can get a half-way decent signal (30-40% signal) from twice that distance if I'm in line of sight of one of my apartment's windows.
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Honestly, that's a really strange thing to suggest. Pay off debt or take out a HUGE loan. Buying real estate is not automatically a good investment. Paying off debt is nearly always a good investment. Pay off credit cards, student loans, car loans and after all that drop it in a savings account.
I've seen way too many people investing while having huge debt. Not many investments can compete with the return you get from being debt free.
If you are debt free, or within a month of it and have enough savings that you won't have to get into debt if your car breaks down or something, then talk with a financial planner. They will be able to tell you if buying a house makes sense for you and how much you can pay for it and have it still make sense. Then talk to a real estate agent and tell them what you learned from the financial planner and they can help you find a place that will be worth it.
A house is a huge liability and can easily push you to bankruptcy if you take it on without being ready for it.
I just had to respond to say, amen brother. People have such a hard time understanding that paying mortgage interest, taxes, maintenance, and so on is also "throwing your money away". That's not to say that owning your own home isn't rewarding and can't be a good investment, because for most people it is both. But live in an apartment, take the money you pay less each month and invest it in the stock market or other higher yielding investments and my guess is that in the long run you might just come out ahead. My guess is that you wouldn't because of taxes, but you'd probably come close.
People also don't understand that renting is definitely a better deal if you're only going to be living in the same place for a couple of years. Unless you're in a real estate market that moves up big, it usually takes 4-6 years before you hit the breakeven point.
With a little time and effort almost any American can get an amateur radio technician class license from the FCC. It does not allow you to transmit 1500 watts at 2.4Ghz! The 2.4Ghz band is unlicensed and the max transmittion power is 100 milliwatts. The closest microwave frequencies are 902-928 MHz and 1.24-1.3Ghz. You should note that there is only 26 kHz and 60 MHz of bandwidth available respectively. Thus the 23cm (1.24-1.3Ghz) band is the only choice for applications similiar to WiFi. 802.11b eats up 22 MHz of bandwidth.
Digital Spread Spectrum is still in its infancies in the amateur radio community. However, progress is being made.
With what little knowledge that I have concerning radio theory, it should be possible to modify an access point or WiFi card and get it on the 23cm band. It might even be easier considering that 1.24 Ghz is almost a harmonic (half) of 2.4Ghz.
If you do manage to do such a thing, there would be a few requirements concerning identification. The access point would need to broadcast your callsign; this might be fullfilled with your callsign as the SID. The data traffic could not be encrypted, the data could not be offensive, and you must have control over the equipment.
I agree with paying off dept. If you have any, get rid of it as best you can. Then don't take on any more.
However buying a house may or may not be a good idea. Studies have shown that you end off about the same if you buy a house, or invest your money. Sure rent always goes up, but you have home repairs otherwise. In fact, I can't rent an apartment as big as my tiny house, and one that I could rent for the same money would be just a 1 bedroom. However dont' forget to account for the other bills. I currently have to pay to pump my septic tank. I have to pay the plumber when a pipe bursts. If the furnance breaks I have to pay someone to fix it. Now some of those tasks I can do myself, but I still have to buy parts, plus account for my time in labor.
Its been said that you need to live in a house for 7 years to make it worth it. If you don't plan on living in one area for that long, renting is best.
There are plenty of other good investments. Talk to a good stock broker for instance (beware, there are many bad ones out there), and you can get on some good ideas. A house may go up in value, but you can sell stock pretty much any day, and any quantity. There is no way to sell a tenth of your house if you want that much money for something. Even if you decide to sell your house it often takes 3 months to sell and a couple more months to close. I know of some houses that took over a year to sell. Wtih stock you can get your money now, and you don't have to sell the whole thing.
Stocks are not the only investment. Bonds have a bad name currently, but they are not nessicarly bad if you understand them.
This wireless plan may or may not be a good idea. If you are planning on starting a buisness (ie there is no DSL/cable, so you will buy a T1 and split the cost plus some profit) this might be a good seed money to get started. Run the numbers though and make sure you are charging enough to pay for the line plus equipment that might break, plus support for the other users. Basicly do a full buisness plan and get someone who knows them to review it. If your bank wouldn't give you a loan to start this buisness why would you spend your own money to start it?
I saw your post and was a little surprised because of the similarity of your setup to mine. I live in a 5-floor building, you see, and we kind of have a little "community" here ourselves.
There are six rental units in the building and three of us share an Internet connection. (We also have an antenna hanging out the window so that we have wireless at the cafe down the block.)
Now, I understand that you said that you have access to place equipment in various places. My personal preference is against wireless. You get interference and/or flaky connections at points and personally I would (again, if you do have access) lay in physical cable (cat-5). If the various individual apartments want to put in their own local wireless, that's cool. But when you begin to worry about walls and other impediments, I think you're better off linking the various apartments onto a physical cable backbone and then letting the wireless points be stationed in each apartment.
My next-door neighbor has the actual physical connection to the outside world, for example. I get reception that is often good (but often not) in the front room of my aparment, which is near the base station. In my back room, I get CRAPPY reception from his base station, but I can see my downstairs neighbors base station. Two points here - firstly, he has his own base station because down one floor and over one apartment his reception was bad, so he decided to get his own base station hanging off the cable that he already had in his apartment. Secondly, I can see his base station in my back room but haven't given him my MAC yet (which is my bad)- he's doing MAC filtering - and so I don't have access to his net yet. The point is, that I think it would be easier for everyone to have their own local base station inside each apartment - they can place it where its best for each of them individually.
I know I haven't really been talking about budget issues in the above - mostly about architecure. However, if you put a router in each apartment, and a base station, and some category 5 cable, then you'll have a good network and I don't see it costing anywhere near 7K. Both base stations and routers have become cheap (especially routers) and so I think you could definitely keep the cost under $200/apartment.
well, those are my thoughts. have fun - sounds like a cool project!
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
There are psychological aspects to consider as well. As one person told me, "You don't own your house until you've finished paying off the mortgage". As another former homeowner said, "It wasn't me owning a house. It was more like a house owning me." When you own property, you also have to consider added costs like homeowner's insurance. You also become your own super, which means you have to shell out money (and as important, TIME) for home repairs. Do you really want to spend your leisure time doing yard work? (No? More money to shell out to contractors.)
And face it, if economic times get tough, it doesn't mean you can just dump the house and preserve your accumulated equity. Don't get me wrong; you can TRY, you just may not be successful in that goal.
From a financial point of view, property owning is usually a winner. (I don't believe in factoring in presumed future accumulated value without considering the potential downsides as well.) You obviously get away with taxes. When you rent, you're paying taxes on the rental. Its just unlisted price adjustment in your landlord's rent calculations. When you own, you get money back that would be going to George W Bush.
For me, its the psychological aspect that gets me. I "can't" just pick up and go. I "can't" tell the boss where he can stick this job. I have to spend time doing drudgework, rather than on my computer. Yeah, when I have a long-term gig, I'm going condo, but that is yet another ball of wax.
Funny, my first thought was exactly the parent reactions to the story. I'm a tad pleased it was the first thought of a lot of people.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Maybe you'll be shrewd enough to figure out that he's started advertising the wireless, and that's why he's charging more for rents. So you'll threaten to dismantle the whole system. At that point, BOOM! He'll slap you with a lawsuit, seeking both:
- An injunction preventing you from gaining access to the building for purposes of making unauthorized modifications, including but not limited to removing the network hardware
- Damages, for your having installed it against his wishes in the first place.
Mind you, I come from San Francisco, so maybe my view of landlords is a little too pessimistic for where you live. YMMV.Breakfast served all day!
. Invest it in a solid fund or IRA. This would be much wiser than blowing it
'wiser than blowing it? yes
wise thing to do? not a chance.
401K and other "retirement" funds are the biggest scam america has going by these banks..
Getting a paltry few precent per year on your money while paying 14 to 28% interest on your debt.
it is pure stupidity to save money when you are bleeding it.
Pay off bills absolutely number one. Then learn about debt and how to use it. Credit cards are NOT NEEDED and the only debts you should ever get into are ones that make you money like a home or other items that INCRASE in value faster than the interest rate is sucking it back down.
anyone under the age of 30 investing in retirement is pure stupidity... pay off your debts and you will increase wealth faster than any IRA or "solid fund"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.